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> At the present time we are not distributing the modified TeX sources that generate these tagged examples Why not?
Maybe there are no source changes, and everything is handled by the engine, or maybe it introduces some extra \startread \endread tags without the need of an environment.
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I'd argue it still is a terrible format for anything other than printing. It values form over function. I mean this makes sense for laying out papers to be published into a physical journal, but it doesn't make as much sense for other purposes. I'd much rather have plain text, or markdown, or asciidoc than PDF or HTML. It works everywhere. And support for embedded mathematical typesetting is a solved problem.
I agree plain text has a lot of appeal. But support for embedded mathematical typesetting, images etc, being solved feels like a stretch. I mean sure, you can do it, but now you are on the other end of function over form. I feel like PDFs are, for tons of usecases, the best we've got. The alternative isn't markdown, it's usually .docx.
> Using Tagged PDF for Accessibility and Reuse in PDF 2.0 https://pdfa.org/wtpdf/ This sounds amazing! Some years ago I was involved with a project for a company where we tried to extract some data from some PDF files they had. But neither OCR nor my attempts at reconstructing order of text in the documents panned out in the end, and it all ended in tears :( Perhaps one day in the future dealing with extracting data…
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Sounds like this would massively simplify converting scientific articles back to HTML or text. Seriously, I know of one experiment that has O(thousands) of papers as latex source, which they publish as PDFs and which (more recently) they convert back to markdown with some ML-based image to text engine. All so that it can be fed to a vector database to make searching easier, of course. PDFs are a terrible format for m…
>PDFs are a terrible format for machine readable information was terrible format. PDF 2.0 Tagged PDF has MathML support, Index, Quote, BibEntry, Title, lists, tables, .... you can derive HTML from PDF if it's fully tagged. PDF also support displaying and print production better than anything.
For most content PDFs are used today, I'd much prefer extending something like ePub "downwards" with stylesheets, rendering hints etc. – that can all just be thrown out by an accessibility- or readability-focused viewer.
Yet, the PDF ecosystem is so large at this point, and so many organizations are still tied to skeuomorphic ideas focused around printed pages of text, that I can't see it happen anytime soon. I just hope that at least academia figures something out.
ArXiv's recent HTML efforts [1] are a great step in that direction, but as I understand it, they still use PDF as their main ingestion format.
[1] https://blog.arxiv.org/2023/12/21/accessibility-update-arxiv...
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I agree plain text has a lot of appeal. But support for embedded mathematical typesetting, images etc, being solved feels like a stretch. I mean sure, you can do it, but now you are on the other end of function over form. I feel like PDFs are, for tons of usecases, the best we've got. The alternative isn't markdown, it's usually .docx.
The actual alternative is EPUBs
Most viewers on iOS, macOS, Linux and Android that I've tried are very tied to the idea of all ePubs being ebooks and insist on managing them in their own library, don't optimize latency to first page rendered (because they usually index and cache a bunch of stuff for a "newly opened book", assuming you'll be reading it over the course of days/weeks) etc.
For example, on macOS, the default app associated with ePub is Apple Books, but to be able to use technical papers in ePub format, I really need something like Preview.app (and that doesn't support them). (In that way, the situation is very similar to JPEG XL: macOS supports them in quick view, but only Safari can actually open them...)
This must be a joke. LaTeX cannot even produce accessible PDF today. Believe me, I tried. I write my lecture notes in LaTeX and some of my students have disabilities. I tried to follow these guides https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/261537/a-guide-on-ho... (note the Feb 2024 update). No matter how technically "correct" the LaTeX people want it to be, even a PDF produced by MS Word was more accessible for my stud…
As you might be aware, the author of the message is David Carlisle, a very active member at TeX (766k rep) and is also a maintainer of many popular packages.
Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed.
This must be a joke. LaTeX cannot even produce accessible PDF today. Believe me, I tried. I write my lecture notes in LaTeX and some of my students have disabilities. I tried to follow these guides https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/261537/a-guide-on-ho... (note the Feb 2024 update). No matter how technically "correct" the LaTeX people want it to be, even a PDF produced by MS Word was more accessible for my stud…
Since you are familiar with the TeX StackExchange, perhaps you can ask there? As you might be aware, the author of the message is David Carlisle, a very active member at TeX (766k rep) and is also a maintainer of many popular packages. Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed.
I have. I don't want to link my HN identity to my SE identity (which is tied to my real world identity through mathoverflow) so I won't link here.
> Needless to say, the guide you followed is 8 years old; Perhaps some things have changed.
As I said, it was updated in February 2024. I was written by Ulrike Fischer who's also very involved in latex3. It's basically the current state of the art in accessible PDFs. And it's still not good enough.
I wish it were otherwise, but latex is the pinnacle of design-by-committee and tech debt. Given how latex3 turned out, I'm very pessimistic. The only thing latex has going for it is inertia.
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The actual alternative is EPUBs
I love ePub, but I also have to admit that the viewer experience for non-books is really not quite there yet. Most viewers on iOS, macOS, Linux and Android that I've tried are very tied to the idea of all ePubs being ebooks and insist on managing them in their own library, don't optimize latency to first page rendered (because they usually index and cache a bunch of stuff for a "newly opened book", assuming you'll be…